Recent Columns

Since it’s fresh on my mind from  yesterday’s note on the Somalis thrown into a Kampala jail for allegedly plotting a terror attack around here, I should add that I’ve had my own experience with a Ugandan jail. To speak with a certain investigating police officer, Joseph, I was once a visitor at a local precinct after my vehicle was […]

So, a bunch of Somalis in a slum not far from here apparently wanted to blow something up, something big if they had it their way, which has happened in this corner of the world before. You’ll recall what happened in Nairobi right around this time last year. (And if you’ve forgotten, read this, how a day of shopping turned […]

We’re at it again, hockey in Africa, and it’s with sadness and regret that I have to report that the other evening the girls, that is Mom and Liz and Hannah, beat the boys, that is Jon and myself, by a lone goal scored in a sort of overtime only because the girls had a FOURTH player […]

We left last time talking about pregnancy and birth and all that, especially at certain universities in Uganda. (Which brings me to this brief conversation between Hannah and Mom at the hospital just before we left Canada recently.) Mom: It was a busy night. We had 11 deliveries. We even had twins. One boy and one girl. […]

A recent conversation with my eldest. Liz: Daddy, do you like my high heels? Me: No. They’ll give you a bad back. Liz: But Daddy, I’m growing up. Me: You’re barely out of the womb. + This brings us to The Cat. Faithful Reader knows enough about this playboy animal. He has a history here in our Ugandan […]

Friends – Today we — My Bride, the children, Yours Truly — are back on a plane to Uganda. (And, as they say, it’s not the destination that counts, but the journey. This is why in my family we don’t really care where exactly the plane may be flying, as long as the movies are all working fine.) […]

It was the last night in my Canadian home. The day, a busy one, the end of a stretching week, was spent keeping some semblance of order, some idea of knowing what, with the dwindling time left, was still most important. I was outside my front door, in the dark, fumbling with my keys, looking for […]

It’s been a mad dash these days to pack up the house – again – for our annual return to Uganda. The plane flies this holiday weekend. One of the cats at our African home – she was a kitten not long ago – has apparently given birth in our absence. We’ve been sent video […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, August 23, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ He needs a home with others. Assisted living. There are options in Hamilton. He needs one before he’s destroyed by his uncertainty and fear, his black as midnight darkness. He’s not a star, not a celebrity, not, say, Robin Williams, whose suicide just shook us so deeply. He’s simply your neighbour. This is his story.

The highlight of the week was seeing a buddy from ye olde boyhood years. I hadn’t seen him for more than three decades. He and his wife came the other evening for dinner. “This is my son, Jon,” I said, at one moment. “And this is my friend …” “Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Jon. “This is your friend […]

In the end, we are story as much as we are anything. This is one reason why it works so well, this movie, Boyhood, which follows in real time filming the life of a boy who, over the span of a dozen or so years, grows up. It’s a remarkable movie-making twist — thank you Richard Linklater […]

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ You’ve worked hard for this your whole life, this, your university career, your education and future, your dreams of a better life. Then it happened. You made a mistake. Now you’re pregnant. You’re pregnant while at a religious university. You know what happens next. You get thrown out. Everything will be gone. Your hard-earned tuition and your honour and your hope for tomorrow too, all lost. So you got that abortion.

(Christian Week - Friday, August 15, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ The sad truth of the matter is that when we stop reading the Bible with any faith or confidence, when we stop discussing it at dinner with our children, when we stop wrestling with it in our meeting places and home gatherings and while lying in bed, we’re no longer connected to the grand sweep of it, to history, that is His Story, which is also our story.

It’s the other day and we laugh about it, Jon and myself, because we had just been fishing at the bayfront and this is what got us on the topic of tattoos. Jon wants a tattoo of a fish. Of course getting a tattoo isn’t what it used to be. Even people of my own set […]

The scene is a snowy one and there is a bus travelling down the road. And as the bus roars along, these are the thoughts – you can hear them right inside his head – of the traveller aboard. He’s looking, with all his pain and hope too, out the bus window. “All of life […]